This chapter is from the book

Converting Screen Shots to PDF

This is a Macintosh-only feature. When it's selected, Acrobat lets you capture the contents of a window, a region, or an entire screen to a PDF file. This is convenient for people who write computer documentation.

Figure 4.15 On the Macintosh, Acrobat can capture parts of your computer screen and convert the image to PDF.

After a moment, Acrobat presents you with a document window containing an image of the entire screen.

Choose File > Save As to save this file to disk.

Web Site Conversion Settings

The controls in the Create PDF from Web Page dialog box (Figure 4.12) have the critical purpose of limiting the scope of your Web capture. At the extreme, they keep you from inadvertently trying to convert the entire World Wide Web into a single (large!) PDF file.

Get only n level(s). Here you specify the extent to which Acrobat should grab Web pages that are the target of links on your selected Web page. A value of 1 says to get only the Web page whose address you have specified. A value of 2 says to get that Web page and any pages linked to by that page. A value of 3 additionally captures pages linked to by those pages, and so forth.

Keep this number small. Very small. The larger the number of levels you specify, the exponentially longer the conversion will take.

Get entire site. As it says, this option converts the entire site to PDF. I strongly recommend against selecting this, since it can take an amazingly long time.

Stay on same path. Like all files, the HTML files that make up a Web site reside in a directory on a hard disk—in this case, the Web server's disk. This option prevents Acrobat from following links that reside outside the target Web page's location or its subdirectories. I recommend choosing this.

Stay on the same server. Acrobat won't follow links off your target page's server. I strongly recommend this option. Otherwise, for example, if the page you request has links to its sponsors, you may find yourself trying to convert all of Microsoft's Web site to a PDF file.